In a stunning media error, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart referred to “California Republican Congressman Jack Kimble” in a post last night. Problem is, there is no Congressman Jack Kimble:
The fictional Kimble claims to be from California's 54th district -- California only has 53 districts -- and his twitter page is adorned with corporate logos including Cargill, Fidelity Investments and Toys R' Us. At first glance, Kimble's posts appear to be in line with conservative ideology, but they are in fact subtle digs at the conservative movement.
I almost feel sorry for Capehart except that this embarrassing incident was completely self-inflicted. How many times have we DFH’s bemoaned of our national press, “can’t you people Google?”
The typical rejoinder one gets is that news is now a 24/7 business and deadlines are awful and no one pays for fact checking or copy editing blabbedy blah blah. Yeah I hear you, it sucks, we’ve all made mistakes, I’ve made some bad ones but the thing is no one is fucking paying me for my blog, this is something I do on my spare time for free and if I fuck up it’s my own fuckup, not another scar on fast-eroding 130 year old tradition. I mean seriously, if you can’t take the time to Google the Congressman and his district and realize it’s a parody then what the hell are you doing writing for the nation’s oldest newspaper?
This story is stupid, and trivial; Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart will have a moment of fun at Capehart’s expense and we'll all move on. But I wanted to talk about it because the problem is bigger than Jonathan Capehart. This incident points to a larger issue. All around us our institutions are proving themselves completely inadequate to the task at hand, be it educating our kids or fixing our economy or fixing our levees and roads or fixing our politics. And if anyone ever wonders how the nation got dragged into a war of choice in Iraq, it's because we’re a nation of incompetents and low standards.
I’ve often thought that 9/11’s biggest impact on America was that it struck a major blow to an already wounded national morale, and we keep taking hits. Sept. 11 came at the completely wrong time (if a “right” time could be said to exist), since the national psyche was still reeling from the Clenis fallout: all of that angst over a presidential blow job that should never have been international news yet somehow was.
This was followed by the botched 2000 election which cast a pall of doubt over our entire electoral system. It was the kind of thing you read about happening in third world countries and places like Iran, not here. And then some guys armed only with boxcutters hijacked three airplanes and launched an attack on the U.S.? And then the crash of the Columbia space shuttle, followed by invasion of Iraq which, it would soon become clear, was based on misinformation and lies -- I mean, even if you believed it was the right thing to do, that it was totally worth it, where are the WMD’s? Still? To this day? And then the Northeast power grid failure, the levees failing in New Orleans and the major Hurricane Katrina failure and then a bridge collapses over the Mississippi River in Minnesota? And then the financial collapse and the real estate bubble bursts? And an oil well spewing filth into the Gulf of Mexico for months on end?
(And what am I forgetting? Anything else sucky about the past 10 years I’ve overlooked? Doping by sports heroes? Political philandering?) America sure has had that merde touch for the past decade, n’est ce pas?
Against this entire backdrop we’ve got people like Glenn Beck selling crazy juice to the nation. I mean no wonder the nation feels like crap. This kind of stuff used to happen to other countries, not us. America the mighty and strong, America the first to walk on the moon, America whose interstate system and military might and radical yet peaceful regime change every few years were the envy of the world!
It all hit the shitter at once, didn’t it? We the people are completely demoralized; now we have reporters who can’t even hit the Google and Vice Presidential Candidates pwned by Canadian comedians. What in God’s name happened? (And no, I ain’t blaming this on teaching evolution, gay marriage and abortion. Be real.)
I’d like to say Mercury has been retrograde over America for the past 15 years, but I suspect this national lowering of standards happened long ago and we're just now reaping that harvest. Our education system has been crumbling for years yet we ignored the warning signs of falling test scores and Why Johnny Can’t Read reports and our national cluelessness about geography. This is an empire in tailspin, and I suspect it’s been happening a lot longer than any of us realized.
How we get out of this mess is anyone’s guess. I suppose we could all try a little harder to be our best (fill in the blank...). Maybe some great national project, a manned mission to Mars or something. I dunno. Electing our first black president sure got everyone feeling hopey-changey, until the Republicans decided to stick their feet in the mud and answer “no you can’t” to every “yes we can” cheer. Honestly I have the feeling that one group of Americans just wants to wallow in feeling really really crappy right now while another group is wanting to think happy thoughts, which is really hard to do when you’re given bad news at every turn.
So I don’t have any answers. I know the nation is turning its hopeful eyes to a lot of someones and somewheres, but everywhere we look we see just a spectacular fail.
